Author: josh

Finally Completed

Posted on by josh
I started my Hackintosh project last week (Friday night).  I’ve been working almost nonstop on this project.  I just finally completed doing a complete installation from beginning to end with all the required patches and fixes in between.  Been tweaking and trying to find the best method for the last week.  Now I have full graphics support (Diablo III seems to play OK with High Graphics) with QE/CI enabled (equivalent of Aero in Windows Vista/7), Sound (although no sound in D3 for some reason), and USB & USB3.0.  I also got the system booting straight from the hard drive without the use of the CD.  Time Machine seems to be working alright, though I don’t have enough space to use for it really.  I have been able to succesfully use iTunes & Mac App Store with my iTunes account.  So far, so good.  The only bug I have really is that when I shut down, the computer turns off and back on as if it was rebooting.  Once or twice earlier it shut down properly.  Not sure what to do for that fix.  But oh well.  Was a fun project.  Look forward to playing around with OS X Lion now for development & repair purposes.

OS X Lion on my PC

Posted on by josh

I’ve done it before, and I’m at it again.  Can’t resist the pretty-ish OS X Lion interface.  Can’t really afford to go out and spend $600+ on a system that is built to run it, so I’ve spent the last week working on this.  I am nearly finished.  I finally have my PC booting and nearly fully running with OS X 10.7.1.  For some reason, the 10.7.4 Combo Update is taking forever to download.  My graphics are halfway working at the moment, but according so some posts should work natively once I get update to at least 10.7.3.  Will post more once I get further.

 

Ethernet over Power

Posted on by josh
For anyone who isn’t familiar with this technology yet, it’s worth getting to know about.  My company is helping a customer setup a wireless configuration that will broadcast from his front porch through the whole house, and onto the back porch.  We have considered running cables and hard wiring the house, but it is an old house and the walls are mostly solid making it difficult to do this.  We want to hardware an access point on either end of the house providing to strong connections from either way.  To do this, we are going to use Ethernet over Power line Adapters (EoP).  These adapters translate a regular CAT5/6 Data connection into frequencies that can be transmitted straight into the outlet into the internal circuitry of the building on one end.  At the other end is another adapter plugged into an outlet somewhere within the building which translates that electrical frequency back into a low voltage CAT5/6 Data signal.  We will attach two of these “receiving” EoP adapters to outlets at either end of the house.  Of course the third “uplink” EoP adapter will be near the router and modem.  Then we should be able to configure a Wireless Access Point (WAP) at each of the “receiving” EoP adapters.  This should ultimately be much cheaper than having to put cables into the house.  And we really hate using Wireless-to-Wireless Access Point connections.  Typically creates too much latency.If you have a need for one of these, check out this Linksys PLEK400 Powerline Adapter Kit available @ officemax.com:

Automatic Updating Wallpapers

Posted on by josh
I’ve had plenty of friends and customers over the years who have used third party programs in order to get their wallpapers to rotate through a “public” gallery periodically throughout the day.  I have always hated this since it requires using a 3rd party program (meaning that it is not a part of the O/S or even from Microsoft).  I have just discovered, a little late, I might add, that Windows 7 has the ability to use image RSS feeds for updating your wallpaper.  I knew Apple had added the RSS feed Wallpapers/Screensavers, but had not seen the wallpaper option.

Ghost Printer Stops Mouse In Movement

Posted on by josh
So today I came across an unusual problem.  Probably very rare as I was unable to find any useful forum posts.  Basically, a customer reported to me that when they print [to a shared printer] the mouse stops moving until the printer is done.  My first thought was that the spooler service must be causing user input to freeze/hang.I first looked into my spooler suspicion.  The keyboard was unaffected when the printer was active, however, the mouse locked up pretty much from the time paper was pulled into the printer until the printer shot the paper out.  The mouse was wireless/USB.  The computer was sitting side by side to the printer.  The printer was hooked up with a USB cable to computer B and was shared over the network to aforementioned computer.

I hooked up a USB mouse just to rule out another piece of the mystery.  Not to my surprise, the USB mouse was unaffected while the wireless mouse froze.  What was really fishy was that even if I printed from computer B [the host computer] the mouse on computer A would still lock up.  This lead me to believe that the problem was obviously coming from the printer itself.  My assumption was that some electrical noise was coming from the printer and the USB mouse receiver was getting interference and causing the mouse to be useless.  I plugged the receiver in to a back USB port putting it at least a foot away from (rather than 1 inch) the side of the printer and this resolved the problem permanently.

Just thought I’d share this likely rare occurrence with other techs.  Anyone with a similar experience or a technical explanation feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading.